Widening access to UK medical education for under-represented socioeconomic groups: modelling the impact of the UKCAT in the 2009 cohort

Despite initiatives to widen access to medical training, most medical students come from relatively advantaged backgrounds.1 No consensus exists as to how to best select medical students from the large number of applicants to medical school every year. Academic results could well be relied on too much, although they have been shown to predict performance at medical schools quite closely.2 In the United Kingdom, the personal statement on the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) form is widely used as a discriminator, and face to face interviews are thought to be important, but both of these methods have questionable validity.3

One innovation is the introduction of the UK clinical aptitude test (UKCAT), which is now used by 25 of the 31 medical schools in the UK. An aptitude test is a selection test (such as an IQ test) in which the candidate’s innate abilities and potential for achievement (and not